Wednesday, 1 October 2014

First month done!

I can't believe I've been in Scotland for a month already! Only 2 months and 20 days left, which really isn't that much.

Actual school

I'm halfway through my second week at my school, University of Glasgow, Glasgow University, or just uni. Their system seems more flexible in some ways, and others more rigid. Some students do a year at a college, (like community college) then go to uni, and there's a lot of older people too going to uni for the first time. Some of the adults have more technical degrees already, or there's another certification thing I haven't quite figure out yet-the people talking to me had pretty strong accents. The more rigid part is that people study pretty much one thing here- for my education class, every person in the class has 3/4 classes they have to take every semester, so they're together for every class! There's not really a general education base like at Chapman.

Classes in general are a lot smaller than I thought they would be. One is 100, one is 60ish, and the other is 40, so there is a little more discussion than I thought there would be. Everyone in my education class is really friendly, and I've talked to a ton of people, about class itself and everything else, including American politics. I'm learning a lot about Britain and Scotland, from an education perspective as well as from my economic and social history class.

I have a lot of reading for that history class, which I am currently behind on. It is a very interesting class, but there's even more interesting things to do! Like planning trips, which definitely takes up time, and usually starts at one place, and ends up in a completely different direction.

I just had my first black and white photo class from the Glasgow School of Art, who has an agreement with uni for study abroad students to take beginning classes from them, a world renowned institution! I have a manual camera with me, and I know the very basics-otherwise we're just starting our first project, playing and learning as we go! More updates later, because I haven't actually taken a picture with it yet...

Everything else

I've booked my flight to London! I'm really happy I have no Friday class because I get 3 nights and 3 days in London, which is a nice long weekend.

Going to the Highlands for a weekend trip this weekend, and to the Isle of Skye for the next weekend! Hoping to get good black and white photos of it too :)

Elise brought me to a John Lewis concert last Sunday. I ended up really liked the opening band too, which was Amber Run- still gotta look them up. And Lewis Watson was really good live too! Better than the youtube videos I've been listening to.